Spotlight Science News

Researchers have designed carbon aerogels that can be reversibly stretched to more than three times their original length, displaying elasticity similar to that of a rubber band. By adding reversible stretchability to aerogels' ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have for the first time identified a specific chemical used by the higher termite castes—the queens and the kings—to communicate their royal status with worker termites. ...

A new scenario seeking to explain how Mars' putative oceans came and went over the last 4 billion years implies that the oceans formed several hundred million years earlier and were not as deep as once thought.

A motif of Japanese basketweaving known as the kagome pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades. Kagome baskets are typically made from strips of bamboo woven into a highly symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing ...

Some novel materials that sound too good to be true turn out to be true and good. An emergent class of semiconductors, which could affordably light up our future with nuanced colors emanating from lasers, lamps, and even ...

In a new study, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories observed the formation of two kinds of defects in individual nanowires, which are smaller in diameter than ...

Working with light and genetically engineered bacteria, researchers from Stanford University are able to shape the growth of bacterial communities. From polka dots to stripes to circuits, they can render intricate designs ...

In a recent paper published in Cell Reports, Saint Louis University researchers have uncovered new answers about why cells rapidly age in children with a rare and fatal disease. The data points to cellular replication stress ...

Voters in modern democracies, such as the United States and Germany, have long held the power to take from the rich, give to the poor and erase the huge economic inequalities that separate the vast majority of a nation's ...

On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare—an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips ...

Materials used in electronic devices are typically chosen because they possess either special magnetic or special electrical properties. However, an international team of researchers using neutron scattering recently identified ...

A self-driving Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in a Phoenix suburb in the first fatality involving a fully autonomous test vehicle, prompting the ride-hailing company Monday to suspend all road-testing of such ...

Police detectives analyze isotopes in human hair to find out where a murder victim was born and grew up. Ashley Sharpe, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and colleagues combined clues ...

A team of researchers from Korea, the U.K. and Denmark has found fossilized brains of sea creatures that lived during the Cambrian explosion. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

Bacteria and Archaea are two of the three domains of life. Both must have evolved from the putative last universal common ancestor (LUCA). One hypothesis is that this happened because the cell membrane in LUCA was an unstable ...

Reproductive hormones that develop during puberty are not responsible for changes in social behavior that occur during adolescence, according to the results of a newly published study by a University at Buffalo researcher.

Small scale agricultural farming was first initiated by indigenous communities living on Turkey's Anatolian plateau, and not introduced by migrant farmers as previously thought, according to new research by the University ...

A team of physicists has developed a method to generate and self-organize liquids into well-defined patterns, a breakthrough that offers potential new pathways for the development of more sophisticated pharmaceuticals and ...

Targeted geoengineering to preserve continental ice sheets deserves serious research and investment, argues an international team of researchers in a Comment published March 14 in the journal Nature. Without intervention, ...

A long-standing debate in the field of cultural evolution has revolved around the question of how and why human societies become more hierarchical. Some theorize that material changes to a society's resources or subsistence ...

DNA has an important job—it tells your cells which proteins to make. Now, a research team at the University of Delaware has developed technology to program strands of DNA into switches that turn proteins on and off.

It's been nearly two decades since a UC Santa Cruz research team announced that they had assembled and posted the first human genome sequence on the internet. Despite the passage of time, enormous gaps remain in our genomic ...

Death is certain for all living things, including the body's cells. The act of dying is in fact as sophisticated as any process a cell might perform during its lifetime—and when glitches in cell death occur, they can lead ...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have shed new light on how mountain pine beetles produce an important pheromone called trans-verbenol, which could aid in efforts to better predict outbreaks.

It was a pretty big week for physics as Stephen Hawking, the best-known physicist of his time, died—one of science's biggest celebrities since Albert Einstein, Hawking not only conducted groundbreaking science but brought ...

When drawing scientists, U.S. children now depict female scientists more often than ever, according to new Northwestern University research, which analyzed five decades of "Draw-A-Scientist" studies conducted since the 1960s.

Facebook likes can tell a lot about a person. Maybe even enough to fuel a voter-manipulation effort like the one a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm stands accused of—and which Facebook may have enabled.

Although scientists warn that urgent action is needed to stop climate change, public engagement continues to lag. Many social scientists say people are hesitant to act on climate change because, especially in Western industrialized ...

Facebook announced Monday it has hired a digital forensics firm to investigate the handling of data on millions of Americans leaked to a consulting firm working on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Facebook shares plunged Monday as the social media giant faced an onslaught of criticism at home and abroad over revelations that a firm working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign harvested and misused data on 50 million ...

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab ...

This year's unexpectedly aggressive flu season reminds everyone that although the flu vaccine can reduce the number of people who contract the virus, it is still not 100 percent effective. Researchers report that a tweak ...

On the seafloor of the shallow coastal regions north of Siberia, microorganisms produce methane when they break down plant remains. If this greenhouse gas finds its way into the water, it can also become trapped in the sea ...

The world drinks a lot of wine, and that means a lot of grapes are consumed every year. But not every part of the grape ends up in the bottle. Seeds, stalks and skins—roughly a quarter of the grapes —- are typically discarded ...

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing ...

Researchers have taken a key step toward helping wildlife coexist more safely with wind power generation by demonstrating the success of an impact detection system that uses vibration sensors mounted to turbine blades.

Most parenting programs aim to teach parents how to reduce their children's disruptive behavior. New research looked at more than 150 studies of these programs, finding differences in what works best according to whether ...

A new paper published in Music Therapy Perspectives examines the importance of music therapy in military healthcare. There has been an increase in music therapy to treat combat-related injuries in recent years. With this ...

Steroids are currently the only available treatment to reduce the repetitive cycles of inflammation and disease progression associated with functional deterioration in patients with muscular dystrophy (MD). A study reported ...

A relatively inexpensive 3-D-printed model of a patient's blood vessels is as effective as current commercially available models for training medical students in interventional radiology vascular access, according to a study ...

In a recent paper published in Cell Reports, Saint Louis University researchers have uncovered new answers about why cells rapidly age in children with a rare and fatal disease. The data points to cellular replication stress ...

Reproductive hormones that develop during puberty are not responsible for changes in social behavior that occur during adolescence, according to the results of a newly published study by a University at Buffalo researcher.

One in four drugs with human targets inhibit the growth of bacteria in the human gut. These drugs cause antibiotic-like side-effects and may promote antibiotic resistance, EMBL researchers report in Nature on March 19.

Decades of work on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at the University at Buffalo and the Veterans Affairs Western New York Healthcare System have yielded extraordinary information about the pathogen that does ...

With the help of robot-assisted rehabilitation and electrochemical spinal cord stimulation, rats with clinically relevant spinal cord injuries regained control of their otherwise paralyzed limbs. But how do brain commands ...

Scientists have discovered a human antibody that protected mice from infection with the deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. The research findings provide the basis for future testing in humans to determine ...

In the largest study of its kind, nine novel genes for osteoarthritis have been discovered by scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators. Results of the study, published today (19 March) in Nature ...

A microfluidic device developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators may help solve a significant and persistent challenge in medicine—diagnosing the life-threatening complication of sepsis. In their paper ...

After a biopsy or surgery, doctors often get a molecular snapshot of a patient's tumor. This snapshot is important - knowing the genetics that cause a cancer can help match a patient with a genetically-targeted treatment. ...

Each day brings with it a host of decisions to be made, and each person approaches those decisions differently. A new study by University of Illinois researchers found that these individual differences are associated with ...

Columbia University researchers have identified the nerve cells that initiate a fly's escape response: that complex series of movements in which an animal senses, and quickly maneuvers away from, something harmful such as ...

Foot orthoses specifically moulded to help people with plantar heel pain appear to be no more effective than cheaper over-the-counter insoles or other treatments, suggests a study published in the British Journal of Sports ...

Ask a dozen people about their greatest fears, and you'll likely get a dozen different responses. That, along with the complexity of the human brain, makes fear—and its close cousin, anxiety—difficult to study. For this ...

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History can tell us a lot about environmental upheaval, say Princeton University historians John Haldon and Lee Mordechai. What is missing in today's debate about climate change is using what we know about how past societies ...

In "Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition," published in Ethics, Michael Cholbi and Alex Madva defend the central arguments of the Black Lives Matter movement's abolitionist stance on capital punishment. ...

Early diagnosis in thyroid cancer can improve a patient's likelihood of recovery, but current screening methods use instruments with poor sensitivity and can yield inaccurate results. Consequently, doctors often have to rely ...

EMBL scientists report in Nature Microbiology on the nutritional preferences and growth characteristics of 96 diverse gut bacterial strains. Their results will help scientists worldwide advance the understanding of the gut ...

For the first time, an interdisciplinary team from the University of Basel has succeeded in integrating artificial organelles into the cells of living zebrafish embryos. This innovative approach using artificial organelles ...

How does the sound of a tiny Earth tremor differ from the sound of a huge passing whale? That is one of the things that scientists had to figure out while listening for the sound of methane release from the sea floor.

An international research team has discovered a new type of curved light beam called a "photonic hook." Photonic hooks are unique, as their radius of curvature is two times smaller than their wavelength. This is the smallest ...

Children with mild to moderate asthma do not benefit from a common practice of increasing their inhaled steroids at the first signs of an asthma exacerbation, according to clinical trial results published in The New England ...

It took eight long years of research, but now an international team led by neuroscientists at Université de Montréal has discovered a basic molecular mechanism that better helps understand how Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic ...

Scientists are bringing precision medicine to rheumatoid arthritis for the first time by using genetic profiling of joint tissue to see which drugs will work for which patients, reports a new Northwestern Medicine multi-site ...

A team of Inserm and CNRS researchers from the Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology have identified a protein that acts like a sensor detecting allergens in the respiratory tract that are responsible for asthma ...

When it comes to treating teens and adults with persistent asthma, using a single corticosteroid and long-acting bronchodilator treatment for both daily asthma control and for rescue relief during sudden asthma attacks is ...

Patients with severe spinal cord injury (SCI) often experience chronically low blood pressure that negatively affects their health, their quality of life and their ability to engage in rehabilitative therapy.

A clinical trial comparing two treatments for postmenopausal vaginal discomfort - low-dose vaginal estrogen and a vaginal moisturizer - to placebo treatments found that both produced symptom improvements similar to those ...

Home genetic tests like AncestryDNA and 23andMe are more popular than ever, with sales topping $99 million in 2017. But a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher highlights the potential negative ...

(HealthDay)—The scenario may sound familiar: Your doctor sends your prescription electronically to the pharmacy, and you go to pick it up. Only you can't, because the insurance company requires "prior authorization" for ...

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have identified a therapeutic target to prevent or delay heart failure from pressure overload of the heart, and a potential biomarker for the same. They say their animal studies ...

In January 2017 guidelines were released urging parents to begin early introduction of peanut-containing foods to reduce the risk of peanut allergy. A new study shows those who are aware of the guidelines are still hesitant ...

A new study carried out by a research team at The University of Western Australia and Fertility Specialists of Western Australia has found that women undergoing IVF who have had embryos fail to implant have more success using ...

A first of its kind study shows typical interruptions experienced by on-call radiologists do not reduce diagnostic accuracy but do change what they look at and increase the amount of time spent on a case.